A Century of Love in a Day, Pt. 2

7. Whatever a man loves he inevitably clings to, and I order not to lose it he rejects everything that keeps him from it. So he who loves God cultivates pure prayer, driving out every passion that keeps him from it.

10. …prefect love presupposes that you love all men equally.

29. …the Divinity is divided but without division and is united but with distinctions. Because of this both the division and the union are paradoxical…

36. In everything that we do God searches out our purpose to see whether we do it for Him or for some other motive.

42. When a trial comes upon you unexpectedly, do not blame the person through whom it came but try to discover the reason why it came, and then you will find a way of dealing with it. For whether through this person or through someone else you had in any case to drink the wormwood of God’s judgment.

43. As long as you have bad habits do not reject hardship, so that through it you may be humbled and eject your pride.

49. …To be spontaneously disposed to do good to those who hate you belongs to perfect spiritual love alone.

54. A monk is a man who has freed his intellect from attachment to material things and by means of self-control, love, psalmody, and prayer cleaves to God.

63. Let no one deceive you…with the notion that you can be saved wile a slave to sensual pleasure and self-esteem.

66. No sinner can escape future judgment without experiencing in this life either voluntary hardships or afflictions he has not chosen.

68. Just as the intellect of a hungry man imagines bread and that of a thirsty man water, so the intellect of a glutton imagines a profusion of foods, that of a sensualist the forms of women, that of a vain man worldly honour, that of an avaricious man financial gain, that of a rancorous man revenge on whoever has offended him, that of an envious man how to harm the object of his envy, and so on with all the other passions. For an intellect agitated by passions is beset by impassioned conceptual images whether the body is awake or asleep.

75. Some of the things given to us by God for our use are in the soul, others are in the body and others related to the body. In the soul are its powers; in the body are the sense organs and other members; relating to the body are food, money, possessions and so on. Our good or bad use of these things given us by God, or of what is contingent upon them, reveals whether we are virtuous or evil.

83. In its natural state, the human intelligence is subject to the divine intelligence and itself rules over the non-intelligent element in us. Let this order be maintained in all things, and there will be no evil among creatures nor anything which draws us towards evil.